6. Tom Schaar – Airborne

There comes a time in every energy drink-endorsing, contest circuit-reared young person’s life when they feel compelled to cast aside the pads and broadcast sporting network camera crews and test his or her mettle in the drainage ditches and barn ramps, where reputations are made and paltry sums are earned in the company of the good homies. And so Tom Schaar, he of the prepubescent 1080, takes that symbolic step over the barbed wire, barging abandoned waterslides and soaring his stalefish high above graffito-tagged pools, getting the full Chris Gregson treatment while adhering to recent Vans regulations requiring transition skaters to soundtrack footage to old-timey music. As the video goes along the tricks get seriously wild, back to back noseblunt screechers, channeling Colin McKay on a hardflip to backside lipslide and Bob Burnquist on a fakie ollie way up into the sky in MegaRampTM land. Is wearing a Monster Beverages sticker on one’s helmet while blasting off a Rockstar Energy Drinks-branded lip the X-Games equivalent of wearing a Nike shirt with Adidas shoes?

In an Age of Plenty, the Challenge of Getting Past Lavar McBride’s Arms When He Nollie Backside Flips the Hubba Hideout Stairs

The subtlety of the X-Games, now legal to drink at 22 years old, lies in its unassailable hamhandedness. From its early, lingering and loving embrace of the ‘extreme’ label even through the market segment’s maturation into ‘action sports,’ to its endorsement of the MegaRampTM and multiyear employment of frequent seagull target Sal Masakela; even as contest-course stewards seek to more tightly bottle and present street skating’s outlaw allure, there could only be one competitive franchise when duty requires blurting onto the interwebs ten minutes of fresh video part footage from the likes of Ishod Wair, Tiago Lemos, Cole Wilson and Na-Kel Smith. If ‘Real Street’ isn’t the best contest franchise, strictly speaking, it’s probably the easiest spoonful to be gulped amongst a medicine chest otherwise proffering antiseptic runs formulated with rocks to fakie, and board-in-hand youngsters hustling up embankments and across quarterpipe decks.

Between sequences extolling the powers of Home Depot’s flooring products, Tiago Lemos’ fakie 360 flip switch backside tailslide pop out and Ishod Wair’s nighttime run through Muni are ladled liberally onto a La La Palooza of skating scooped up over the past week or so. Consider: May 12, Adidas releases a ringing video from a London trip, loaded with Rodrigo TX’s impeccably swished-out technicalities*, the magic-footed Gustav Tonnesen and freshly resurfaced matriculant Mark Suciu; it is this type of clip Adidas’ Juice crew does best and crafts better than nearly anybody. A day later, quasi-Texan Keegan McCutcheon delivers a fulsome spread of shove-its and various relatables over bars, including the hallowed wallride shove. In there somewheres was Mark Del Negro’s ambidextrous arrival via Philly on Hopps, Mark Humienik’s Sable section boasting a blistering noseblunt shove-it, and a Niels Bennett footage dump from Venture, in which a wallie 50-50 on a rail and a humongous switch wallride draws another mop-topped gangler ever closer to the still-glowing OG bathroom sign. On May 17 yung Polar wonder-bowlrider Oskar Rozenberg put out a street-heavy part for Nike, going GX in the SF hills and helping shake the Brooklyn Banks from a seven-year hibernation. And then Thrasher began dropping the Creature video, with full-throated David Gravette and Milton Martinez entries.

A daunting and wondrous time it is for footage consumers, who entertain the challenge of processing and absorbing valuable experience points from video parts with nearly each meal of the day, to say nothing of posting and or in-person pontificating on each amongst one’s chosen bros. For those with the skill, mental gonads and ill judgement to angle for their own slice of the day’s skate video watching capacity, with all of its punishing fickleness and readily rendered harshitudes, it’s gotta be awful tough.

And yet there lurks another threat to these freshly scrubbed video parts, nervously approaching their public debuts with each pixel the upload progress bar adds. Like an icey iceberg sailing deeper into frigid arctic waters, this danger is largely hidden and only grows, sometimes with just the small and pointy bits visible to the non-radar enhanced eye. It appears to you in the form of Lavar McBride’s arms, downward cast after flicking one of mankind’s greatest nollie backside kickflips down the Hubba Hideout steps in ‘Trilogy,’ twenty-one years in the past. Or maybe it appears as Tom Penny blurrily pushing through the parking ramp in TSA’s ‘Life in the Fast Lane,’ or maybe Steve Durante switch heelflipping into a switch frontside bluntslide, or Diego Najera’s still-incomprehensible switch varial heelflip. The lionhearted bros offering up new video parts to the internet’s altar not only compete day-to-day with their contemporaries for its fleeting and capricious favour, but now also with the entire history of what has come before, the best and otherwise.

Of the nollie backside flip’s many historical high points, are Jim Greco’s Baker2G edition or Jake Johnson’s in Mind Field able to command as many repeat rewinds as Lavar McBride’s one with the arms? Where were yall when Lavar McBride was trying to teach you to nollie flip at the DMV? How many minutes in a typical day need be devoted to consuming new footage so as to convincingly hold one’s own on the Slap boards? Where will you be for the X-Games’ dirty thirty?

*just for the record

Rise Of The Machines

Several were astonished this week when Bob Burnquist’s helicopter burst onto the scene with a ‘high-octane’ MegaRampTM video part soundtracked to Creed. Performing a frontside boardslide on its heli-skis, a 720 over the gap and an ‘air’ on the MegaQuarterPipeTM, the chopper cruised the MegaStructureTM like a seasoned pro, albeit one prone to blowing the hats off any rival competitors unlucky enough to be caught on the deck without a chin-strap.

“The race for SOTY is suddenly wide open,” commented one of the few passersby whose mouth was not thrown slack in utter amazement. Nearby a dogeared Thrasher mag flapped ominously in the breeze.

The revelation of a ramp-ravaging helicopter was only beginning to sink in when troublesome questions began to emerge. Machines have yet to attain the needed sophistication to formulate long-winded, rambling and nonsensical blog posts. Yet in other ways their abilities seem boundless. Robots can drive cars, calculate gratuities and vacuum our rumpus rooms. Can it be long before an algorithm is designed that can achieve a perfect Nike Street League score*?

Truthfully skateboarding has not faced such a crisis of identity since Louie the Chimp bested pros and ams alike to capture the cover of Big Brother, only about a year after a Barcelonan dog gazumped Eric Koston out of last-part status in ‘Menikmati.’ While the dog inspired a score of Youtube imitators and some blame Louie’s brief celebrity for Ryan Sheckler’s ill-advised ‘chimp period’, the specter of skating’s takeover by unfeeling robotic overlords is considered by some to be a major league bummer.

Has this helicopter been machine-learning from Bob Burnquist, whose hands-free blizzard flipping, step-up tricks onto the MegaDeckTM and beauty of a backside tailslide are rumored to have pushed back the Plan B video another five years? Watching the two move in perfect sync when setting up for the midair MegaRailTM caveman and their above-coping doubles routine recalls the malicious internet rumors of Bob Burnquist’s alleged dabbling in cybernetics, surgically incorporating microscopic magnets into his feet to better grip his board on the MegaTM.

Is skating ready for a man-machine hybrid? Have Wade Speyer and his giant dump truck already blazed this particular trail in a more classically ’90s’ way? Are lucrative skate collabos with Daft Punk, Svedka vodka and Detroit’s crowd funded Robocop statue now inevitable?

*Insert your favorite “robot style” quip here